Search for 1760 Bray School turns up something even older

Last days of the digMark Kostro backfills (right) as other participants in the summer 2013 archaeological field school continue excavation in the back of Brown Hall. One of the goals was to find evidence of an 18th century school for black children.
Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Mark Kostro stood in the back yard
of Brown Hall, looking down at a hole in the ground.

Even at a glance, the hole was
different from the other features investigated by the students and professional
archaeologists who were spending a second summer working behind the William
& Mary residence hall in a quest to find archaeological evidence of the
Bray School, the 18th-century institution established for the education of free
and enslaved black children.

The 18th-century features exposed
by the summer archaeological field school are all square and orderly,
paralleling Brown Hall and Prince George Street. Such orderly alignment is
found in digs throughout Williamsburg, says Kostro, a Ph.D. student in William
& Mary’s Department of Anthropology and an archaeologist with the Colonial
Williamsburg Department of Architectural and Archaeological Research.

{{youtube:medium|fo47SvsqqoA, Bray School 2013: Expanding the dig.}}

Kostro added that the pit not only
predates the 1760 founding of the Bray School, but also is older than
Williamsburg itself, dating to a time in which the area was merely a crossroads
between the York and the James rivers.

“Williamsburg was founded in 1699
and at that point they laid out all the city streets and lots, oriented on a
north-south, east-west Cartesian grid. Everything built after 1699 would
conform to this grid,” he said. “The hole that we’re looking at does not
conform to that grid. That’s why I think that this feature predates 1699 and
therefore the founding of Williamsburg. It’s a Middle Plantation feature, in
other words.”

Kostro said the hole likely was a
root cellar or food storage pit. Typically, such features are found in
association with the remains of hearths, he added, but the pit behind Brown
Hall stands alone, archaeologically. He said that evidence indicates that the
pit was probably left open for years, slowly filling in naturally through
erosion.

“After a long period of time, this
three-foot pit became just a shallow depression,” he said. Only the top three
to four inches held artifacts, all of which are from the early 18th century.
The artifacts include the typical early Colonial refuse—animal bone, oyster
shell and fragments of German westerwald and English salt-glazed stoneware.
Kostro said that the pottery allows the archaeologists to date the feature.

“The English salt-glazed stoneware
is particularly diagnostic because it was first manufactured around 1720,” he
explained.

The annual field schools are a
collaboration of William & Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
and have been conducted by Kostro and Neil Norman, assistant professor of
anthropology at William & Mary. This summer’s field school was a
continuation of work from last year. One of the goals is to find what the
archaeologists have come to call the “smoking lunchbox”—archaeological evidence
that would verify a thesis that the Bray School building is still standing.

Terry Meyers, Chancellor Professor
of English, compiled evidence that the Bray School was first operated in a
building known as the Digges House, which stood on the site now occupied by
Brown Hall. His research shows that the Digges House was the core of a building
that was moved down Prince George Street in 1930. The building is now known as
Prince George House and houses William & Mary’s ROTC program.

Meyers’ research shows the genesis
of the Bray School, established on the recommendation of no less a personage
than Benjamin Franklin and affiliated with William & Mary. He believes that
the Digges House was depicted on the 1782 Frenchman’s Map, a document set up to
facilitate the quartering of French troops after the battle of Yorktown.

Both Kostro and Norman accept
Meyers’ documentary evidence that places the Bray School on the site now
occupied by Brown Hall. They can’t yet endorse the entire thesis because the
Frenchman’s Map shows that the present Brown Hall site held two structures in 1782.
Either one could have been the original home of the Bray School. Or, the school
may have been housed in a third building, one that had been torn down by the
time the Frenchman made his map.

The field school participants were
hoping to verify Meyers’ thesis: If he is correct, it means that the oldest extant
building used for education of African Americans remains standing in
Williamsburg. The findings of the 2013 field school were consistent with the
site of an 18th century school. The tens of thousands of artifacts recovered
this summer include straight pins, buttons and other sewing-related items.
Meyers’ research shows that sewing was among the skills proposed for study in
the Bray School.

Meyers is also co-chair of the
Lemon Project, a initiative dedicated to exploring William & Mary’s history
of race relations, from slavery days through the Jim Crow period and up to the
present. Meyers gave the field school students some background on the Bray
School through his presentation “William and Mary, Slavery, and Memory.”

“The Bray School is mentioned in
no College history,” Meyers told the students. He added that much of William
& Mary’s race-related history was lost during the revisionist attitudes
during the “moonlight and magnolias” period in the decades following the Civil
War.

Meyers argues that the College’s relationship
with slavery is a complex matter. One end of the spectrum is represented by writings
on the subject by President Thomas
Roderick Dew and his faculty, work that Meyers terms “horrific.”At the other end is evidence
of skepticism about slavery among faculty and students in the second half of
the 18th century. The Lemon Project takes its name
from an enslaved individual who worked at William & Mary, yet the College
granted an honorary degree in 1791 to Granville Sharp, a man whom Meyers calls
“England’s most famous abolitionist.”

Just as was the case in the 2012
field school, the 2013 dig produced clay marbles and slate pencils. These
schoolyard items are common artifacts in Williamsburg archaeology, but Kostro
says they seem to be in greater profusion around Brown Hall.

“We haven’t found the ‘smoking
lunchbox’ yet,” Kostro said, “but what we’ve found, taken all together, might
add up to the lid to the thermos.”

Kostro stressed that beyond
testing Meyers’ thesis, the Brown Hall work will provide valuable insights into
the life of free and enslaved African American children of the period. He said
that archaeological evidence is especially important to flesh out the historical
record of the Bray School.

“This is where artifacts such as
the slate pencils and marbles and sewing-related items will have their greatest
value,” he said. “But we won’t be able to fully appreciate the value until we
can complete the artifact identification process.”

Kostro said that the 17th century
pit, identified in the last few days of the summer field school, likely
represents an earlier chapter in the African American story that played out on
the same piece of ground that decades later, would be the site of the Bray
School.

“Very often, pits like this are
associated with enslaved Africans, with plantation slave quarters. I think it’s
very possible that this is what this feature is,” he said, looking up from the
pit. “This is a big deal.”